By Jeremy Ambrose

Warning: The essay below contains many spoilers. Watch the film first and read the essay afterwards…

When Ernst Lubitsch made the rip-roaring comedy To Be Or Not To Be, about a Polish theatre troupe under Nazi occupation, playing their part for the resistance and “acting” to save their lives, he probably had little idea that his timely 1942 film was paralleling the real-life heroics of another group of Polish actors, who came together to form the “Rhapsody” theatre, playing their part by putting on underground plays as acts of cultural resistance and “acting” to save the identity and tradition of the Polish people. Amongst these actors, who would perform clandestinely behind closed doors before an audience of friends and colleagues, was Karol Wojtyla – the man who would one day become Pope John Paul II.

The Rhapsody Theatre and its audience risked their lives to put on these plays, but they saw in it a worthy cause, as they were fighting for something greater, for their very culture and for freedom. Their plays emphasised “the word” and were meant to keep truth alive, shining so that the darkness could not overcome it. Their performances were acts of cultural resistance, defying the Nazi attempt to destroy their heritage.

Lubitsch’s To Be Or Not To Be could also be seen as an act of cultural resistance, albeit a very different kind, where comedy becomes the shining light resisting the darkness of Nazism, being the weapon to lampoon the ideology and the instrument of truth to spotlight the very real culture of death that was being exported from Germany.

Jack Benny’s brilliant performance as Joseph Tura may be a far cry from the future Polish Pope, and yet both men “act” to save something they love, something worth dying for. For Tura, it is his wife, whom he bickers with and competes with for the limelight, and yet whom he is willing to die for. She has become embroiled in the underground resistance, her very life in danger as she becomes trapped in the centre of high ranking Nazi agents and officers, threatened by their sexual advances as well as their unyielding power. While this doesn’t sound at all like a comedy, because the dangers depicted are all too real, the miracle of Lubitsch’s film is that he effortlessly couples the tragic and the comic, using comedy to empower the Polish heroes as if it were something akin to grace.

Take for instance when Tura impersonates Nazi officer Ehrhardt, in order to save his wife. His great line, “so they call me ‘Concentration Camp’ Ehrhardt?” is not only funny because Tura’s own egocentric impersonation is so ridiculous, but becomes hilarious as the impersonation proves to be completely accurate, revealed later when the real Ehrhardt says exactly the same thing, showing the Nazi to be as egocentric and ridiculous as Tura unintentionally played him. Ehrhardt is a fool, and yet a dangerous fool who partakes in evil actions. Lubitsch’s comedy seems to sketch a shadow of what Hannah Arendt would call the banality of evil, but twenty years before she actually coined the expression. In exposing the evil of Nazism and offering the image of comedy triumphing over this evil, the weapon wielded by the Poles, Lubitsch’s film becomes something of a sacramental sign. The visible sign of Nazi stupidity reveals the ultimate defeat of evil, and the triumph of comedy points towards the eventual triumph of goodness, as we start to witness the unravelling of the mechanisms that this brand of evil is built upon.

Delicately balancing on the thinnest of lines, Lubitsch crafts his film to reveal the evil of Nazism while simultaneously ridiculing it and to do this effectively he balances real tragedy and invented comedy with each other, such that a punch line is not only funny, but devastating in its underlying meaning.

Like when Tura must bluff his way through the Gestapo as he impersonates a Nazi spy, being expected to reveal real names of Poles in the underground movement, without batting an eyelid he rattles off the names of real people he knows. When the Nazi foot soldier sheepishly responds that each person has already been executed for one reason or another, it is a genuinely funny moment because we feel simultaneous relief at Tura’s ingenuity, giving names of those he knows have been executed, which gets him out of his predicament, as well as witnessing the Nazis’ embarrassment that the random people they have killed were the only possible leads to the resistance movement. Yet underlying this is the sadness that these names are real people, personally known by Tura, unique, unrepeatable souls who have lost their lives at the hand of these evil men.

Just when you think the joke is over, Benny as Tura escalates it to another level when he alludes that all is not lost and offers them one last name, the very last opportunity possible to make up for their murdering blunders, their last lead to the resistance… He gives the name and we see the Nazi officer’s face fall, crushed by disappointment and we know Tura has offered one final comic trump – another name of someone already executed.

Comedy is the weapon here with Tura manipulating the Nazis by using their own acts of evil and violence against them. It is also the weapon wielded by Lubitsch the filmmaker, who, like the theatre troupe at the centre of the story, uses the hilarity of his film to combat the very real ideology of evil the allies were battling. He uses his characters, their authenticity and their sacrifices, and in doing so he wins out hearts as well as our laughter.

Each member of the troupe has their part to play, even Bronski and Greenburg, who are always dreaming of the day they will play leading roles in the theatre troupe rather than being relegated to playing the spear carriers. Greenburg dreams of playing ‘Shylock the Jew’, poignant because he is Jewish himself. Both men do play the biggest roles of their lives in the climax of the film and Greenburg finally gets to deliver the lines of Shylock, “If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?” The poignancy of the speech being delivered by a Jew to a troupe of Nazis offers a stark and powerful moment in the middle of the laughs.

The future Pope’s involvement in the Rhapsody theatre, operated on the understanding, as George Weigel puts it, that “the actor had a function not unlike a priest: to open up, through the materials of this world, the realm of transcendent truth”[1].

Greenburg and all of Lubitsch’s characters who make up the theatre troupe then, fulfil this function and use their ‘acting’ to open up and reveal truth. They perform to the various Nazis in the film, but it is us, the film’s audience, who witness Nazi ideology exposed and evil triumphed over by goodness in the form of comedy.

If this then, is the litmus test for what truly good art is, Lubitsch’s film soars above with the best, as we witness a multilayered “opening up” of truth through his skilled filmmaking and comic ability. We are given permission to laugh at and ridicule evil through the marvellously entertaining story, finding mirrored within, the very same reality depicted in art: Tura and his troupe putting their comic and artistic skills towards spotlighting truth in the battle between good and evil and the inherent dignity of the human person.

[1] George Weigel, Witness To Hope, Harper Collins, 1999, p 37.